


Arthur Levine: Christmas Elf

by ladyprydian



Series: Arthur and Eames's Seasonal Playlist [1]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Christmas, Christmas Music, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-24
Updated: 2015-11-24
Packaged: 2018-05-03 03:40:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5275118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladyprydian/pseuds/ladyprydian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arthur's working as a Christmas elf for extra money. Eames finds this amusing. </p><p>Note: Please do not redistribute my fanfiction on other archives or sites without my express permission. Thank you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Arthur Levine: Christmas Elf

**Author's Note:**

> This started out as [a fic prompt I made on tumblr](http://ladyprydian.tumblr.com/post/133745318103/high-school-au-arthur-is-working-as-an-elf-at-the) which I was then encouraged by [lolahardy](http://archiveofourown.org/users/lolahardy/pseuds/lolahardy) to write. 
> 
> Thanks to [involuntaryorange](http://archiveofourown.org/users/involuntaryorange/pseuds/involuntaryorange) for the beta. For correcting all my punctuation mistakes, tense changes, and all round making this a million times better. I'm positive I drove her mad with how shitty this was beforehand.

Christmas was the time of year Arthur both hated and loved. Hated for the stress, consumerism, and enforced togetherness with people you didn’t want to spend time with and avoided all other months of the year. Loved because he could pick up another part time job for extra money. 

So when he told Eames — his boyfriend of these past two years, the boy responsible for making the drudgery of high school bearable — that he’d picked up a part time job as an Elf at the ‘take a photo with Santa’ place in the mall, a smile of abject delight spread slowly across Eames’s face. He giggled, loud and shrill. 

“Do you have to wear the costume?” Eames asked with a grin between the giggles.

Arthur sighed. He knew this was going to be a thing with Eames. “Yes,” he replied with a roll of his eyes. “I have to wear a costume. Green and red tights, some sort of tunic, boots, hat, makeup. All of it.”

By the time Arthur had finished describing the costume, Eames had fallen off the bed and was rolling around on the floor of Arthur’s bedroom. Roaring, absolutely roaring, with laughter.

“Are you boys alright in there?” Arthur’s mom called from the living room. 

“Yes Mom, we’re fine,” Arthur called back. 

“Yes, thank you, Mrs. Levine,” Eames said, finally able to rein in his laughter. 

“Alright then,” she called back, amused. 

Eames wiped the tears from his eyes and cheek with the back of his hand. He sniffed a bit and then gave another snort of laughter when he glanced at Arthur. 

Arthur sighed and let Eames have his fun. It was good money playing a Christmas Elf at the mall. More than the minimum wage he got working as a page at the public library, and he was going to need the money for college. Any little bit extra could go a long way. So he buried his nose in his English Lit book and let Eames come back to himself. 

Eames finally did so and picked himself up off of the floor, only to flop down beside Arthur on the bed. “You have to let me drive you to your Elf shifts,” Eames said, his eyes still sparkling with mirth. “I don’t want anyone else getting ideas about your tush in tights.” Eames wiggled closer to Arthur, rolling over on his side to toss an arm across Arthur’s waist. 

“Eames, you’ll never manage that,” Arthur said, setting Macbeth aside and turning over so he could face Eames. “I bet a bunch will overlap with your job at the coffee shop.”

Eames made a face at that, scrunching his nose and pursing his lips. “Well, I’ll just have to pop by every time you’re there then, won’t I.”

Arthur tsked as he looked at Eames fondly. “Do whatever you want to do. I mean, you always do.” 

“I always do.” 

+++

Shortly before Thanksgiving, Arthur had his first day as an elf. It was more or less a training day; it was behind the scenes, up in the HR offices of the mall. He and five others were assigned their shifts, handed their costumes, told they were responsible for the care and cleanliness of the costumes, taught how to apply elf makeup, and trained in the proper etiquette of an elf. Which, to Arthur’s horror, seemed to involve a lot of smiling and placating of tired yet overexcited children.

He was beginning to wonder if he was way over his head. Smiling didn’t come naturally to him and the only kids he knew were his friend Ariadne’s twin brothers. (Both of whom were eight, loud, and obnoxious. They had broken his glasses once. Mr. Tremblay paid for a new pair and made the boys apologize, but still.) Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. 

When he finally checked his phone, he discovered Eames had sent countless text messages to Arthur throughout the day. There was a disjointed mish-mash of questions about being an elf: 

_“how are you able to make all those toys before xmas? Inquiring minds need answers!”_

There were texts about school assignments:

_“do you have the chem notes from last class?”_  
_“I wasn’t paying attention.”_  
_“Who am I kidding, of course you have them.”_  
_“Got them from your mum, will give back later”_

And there were random thoughts and observations:

_“burnt my hand on the espresso machine watching a bloke pick bogies from his nose”_  
_“like REALLY digging in deep”_  
_“Going at it hard, d’you know what I mean?”_  
_“fucking hurt like bejesus”_  
_“The steam burn that is, not the bogies bloke”_  
_“Made Yusuf clean his table.”_  
_“Didn’t tell him about the bogies”_

Arthur laughed as he scrolled through the texts. When he reached the end he texted back:

_“On the bus. On my way home. If you bring back my chem notes I’ll show you my costume”_

He had barely left the messages screen when Eames pinged him with a reply: _OMW_ followed by a string of exclamation marks and happy/excited emojis.

Arthur smiled.

+++

Despite the extra money, as December drew to a close Arthur was finding it harder and harder to tolerate being an elf. By the time his last shift finally arrived, he’d been coughed on, sneezed at, used as a tissue, hit, cried on, and on one memorable occasion been sick on by overwrought, excited, children. And he’d been shouted at and argued with by stressed out parents.

And then there was the PA system, piping in the same twenty Christmas songs over and over. He had heard them often enough that he knew the play list. Jingle Bell Rock was playing now, which meant Rocking around the Christmas Tree would be next. 

There was one bright spot: true to his word, on days when Eames couldn’t drive Arthur to and from his Elf shifts, he’d popped into see him. 

“That boyfriend of yours is sweet,” said his co-elf Mal. Somehow she managed to make the cheap polyester costume look chic. But that might have had something to do with her purring Parisian accent and the gentle waft of Coco Mademoiselle. “He always comes by with coffee or treats for you. Alright,” she said, turning to a little girl in a pink dress. “You can go see Santa now.”

“It’s because he works in a coffee shop, he gets them for free,” Arthur replied. He loved that Eames brought him coffee and treats, but he wasn’t misguided in thinking that Eames paid for them. Not that there was anything wrong with that. In fact he was glad Eames wasn’t paying for them. Food like that is expensive. Especially from the coffee shop where Eames worked. 

He also loved when he worked with Mal. She would always wrangle the children and let him deal with the transactions with the parents. “I keep telling him to bring bottles of hand sanitizer instead,” Arthur said sotto voce as the next child in line sneezed. 

Mal laughed at that. “The joys of children, non?” 

Arthur didn’t get the chance to reply as a child further down the line burst into shrieks of frustration, or fatigue, or hunger, or excitement, or all of the above plus more. 

Arthur flinched. Mal saw him flinch and laughed harder.

Suddenly the PA system let out the _"bing, bang, bong"_ that alerted staff to incoming messages. During their training day, Arthur was told to pay attention to the chimes as they could precede a lost child report. Considering they were where Santa was, the likelihood of a stray child wandering to their area was high.

But it wasn’t a lost child report. Instead, it was Eames’s voice, saying, “This song is going out to my favourite Elf, Arthur.”  
“Oh no,” Arthur muttered, hiding his face in his hands. 

“Everyone shh!” shouted Mal. “Our dear Elf Arthur here has a song dedicated to him!” Mal wrapped an arm about his shoulder. The parents waiting in line gave him smiles while the children continued to shout and talk.

Worse still, rather than music, Eames began to sing:

_I don’t want a lot for Christmas,  
There is just one thing I need._

“Oh no, no, no, no, no!” Arthur muttered into his hands. Mal chastised him and told him to listen. 

The other adults in line started shushing their children. Other mall patrons stopped walking and talking as well. As everyone stared at Arthur, his panic and secondhand embarrassment skyrocketed. 

_I just want you for my own,  
More than you could ever know_

Some people started humming along. Mal herself was singing quietly in Arthur’s ear, following along with Eames’ harmony. 

“Oh god, Mal! Make him stop,” Arthur whispered. 

“Never, mon cher. This is too cute! Right out of a film, non?” Mal whispered back. 

_Make my wish come true,  
All I want for Christmas, is you!_

Arthur panicked further when the last “you” sounded strangled, as if someone was pulling Eames away from the microphone. The piped-in management-approved Christmas CD shortly resumed, though the opening chords to Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer were louder than normal until the sound was adjusted. People started talking, laughing, and milling about again. 

“Oh God,” Arthur muttered a final time. His cheeks and ears were beet red, visible even under his elf makeup. 

“Arthur that was lovely!” Mal crowed. “Too bad he was cut off and couldn’t finish the song.”

“That was your boyfriend?” A lady in line asked. 

“Yes,” Arthur admitted with a cringe. 

“Looks like security is escorting him away,” she said, pointing to the hallway where two of the mall security guards had Eames by the arms. He wasn’t resisting; he was walking away with them. 

“Eames!” Arthur shouted. Unable to stop himself, he moved away from the dais where Santa was sitting with a child in his lap, listening to what the kid wanted for Christmas. 

“Arthur! Darling!” Eames called back, looking over his shoulder. “I love you!”

“I’ll use the money the mall pays me to post your bail!” Arthur shouted back. It was the stupidest thing to shout. He probably should have shouted “I love you” back, but it was the first thing out of his mouth. 

Eames’ grin widened even though he was still being led away by security.

“How about you let him off with a warning?” someone shouted. 

“Yeah! It’s Christmas, don’t be mean!” another person chimed in. 

“Santa is right there! He’s watching you!” said another. 

More and more people started to yell for security to let Eames go. To let him off with a warning. That no one was hurt by Eames going on the PA system to sing to his sweetheart. To not be a Grinch. People started to move into the path of the security personnel, stopping them from getting any further. 

Security quickly relented and Eames was let go. There was a short, sharp conversation held between Eames and one of the officers but it wasn’t audible over the sound of people beginning to clap. As Eames started to move the clapping got louder and louder. Arthur could do nothing but watch as Eames rushed towards him. 

The clapping, whistling, and cheering reached a crescendo as Eames approached Arthur. He slowed just enough to not slam forcefully into Arthur as he grabbed his face and kissed him hard and deep. 

If anything the cheering got louder. But Arthur didn’t hear it. All that he could hear was Eames’s breathing, Eames’s heart beat. Under the lights of the garish Christmas tree of Santa’s village, all he saw, all he felt, was Eames. 

“Happy Christmas, darling,” Eames said, breaking the kiss to press his forehead against Arthur’s forehead and rub his nose along Arthur’s nose. 

“All I want for Christmas, is you.” Arthur said.


End file.
